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Scientists find gamma ray halo around Milky Way

A halo of gamma rays surrounding the Milky Way November 4, 1997
Web posted at: 11:53 p.m. EST (0453 GMT)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A vast halo of gamma rays surrounds the Milky Way galaxy, scientists reported Tuesday, but they don't know how it got there.

"There is nothing out there that should be obviously making gamma rays," Dave Dixon, a physicist at the University of California-Riverside, said in a statement. "These gamma rays are providing the first evidence that some high energy process is occurring out there."

The halo may be thousands of light-years thick -- a light- year is about 6 trillion miles -- and could extend all the way around the Milky Way, Dixon and his colleagues reported.

The phenomenon was mapped by NASA's orbiting Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The observatory looks at the universe through gamma rays, which are highly energetic particles invisible to Earth-based instruments because the atmosphere absorbs them.

Gamma rays are photons, or particles of light, that have the highest levels of energy of all forms of radiation. A single gamma ray photon in the galactic halo has one billion times the energy of a photon of ordinary visible light.

Astronomers study gamma rays because they might give clues to the most violent events in the universe, such as the birth of galaxies or the death of stars.

The discovery was made by Dixon and colleagues Dieter Hartmann, of Clemson University, and Eric Kolaczyk of the University of Chicago, and presented at a meeting of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society in Estes Park, Colorado.

Copyright 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

 
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